Waco

by David Thibodeau

  In the chapel I again find Jaime Castillo. Tears are streaming down his cheeks. His mask isn’t working properly and he begs me to fetch the spare one he keeps under his bed. Usually quiet and soft-spoken, Jaime’s close to screaming. I run down the corridor, and when I get to the room I find that the entire corner’s been torn out, leaving a gaping wound in the side of the building. Shaken by such a crude scene of destruction, I’m startled by the clear view to the world outside. Out there, military vehicles churn in mud under the overcast sky.

  A strong wind blows into my face, and I’m tempted to remove my mask to take a deep gulp of clean air, to be a normal, breathing person again—if only for an instant. Wearing a gas mask makes you feel smothered, as if a hand is squeezing your face. Only the certainty that the air is poisonous keeps me from ripping it off.

  Climbing over the piled debris of timber and sheetrock, I find Jaime’s mask. When I try to return with it to the chapel, however, the corridor is blocked. The tanks have pushed in the side of the building so far that the internal walls have collapsed. I manage to stumble around the mess and make my way toward the chapel. A moment after I get there I see the piano we had moved to reinforce the front door being shoved deep down the hallway by a tank, blocking the entryway.

  People are sheltering in the chapel, which is now directly under attack. A tank batters the east wall, poking its snout through the gap its boom has opened. When it releases gas we move in a crowd to the far end of the room. From time to time I remove my mask to judge the quality of the air. Sometimes the gas cloud has dissipated, other times it instantly stings my eyes, forcing tears down my cheeks.

  All this time the speakers are blaring: “Do not shoot at us or we will shoot at you. The siege is over. This is not an assault.” Then the voice challenges David directly: “Come out now, David. You’re the leader, come out now.” At any moment I expect agents to burst in, spraying bullets. Yet a strange calm fills the chapel, between the screeching tank strikes. It’s as if we’re in a bubble of silence amid the uproar—a silence punctuated by the sinister popping sounds of gas-filled rocket shells.

  In a moment of curiosity, I examine an unexploded rocket that embedded into a wall. It’s the size of a soda can with tiny fins at one end, a devilish toy filled with poison but somehow touching, like a child’s plaything. But the skin-scarring blisters my Australian friend, Clive Doyle, shows me on his hands are no joke. “Burns like battery acid, mate,” he says, face screwed up in pain. So far my black leather jacket has protected me from such injuries.

  (Later I learn that the FBI Bradleys projected in excess of four hundred explosive rocket rounds into our building, boosting the effect of the sprayed tear gas. Both methods of delivery use noxious CS gas; whereas the sprayed gas is suspended in nontoxic carbon dioxide, the CS in the rocket rounds is mixed at a concentration of one part in ten with deadlier methylene chloride, a petroleum derivative. Methylene chloride is an eye, skin, and respiratory tract irritant. It’s flammable when mixed with air and can become explosive in confined spaces. When it burns it produces hydrogen chloride and the poisonous gas phosgene, which crippled many soldiers during World War I.)

  Along with the popping sounds, I make out the near-distant squeal of a tank turning on its tracks. This monstrous machine is getting set to come at us yet again, and the relentless grind of its engines rattles my bones.

  Despite the uproar and confusion, people are sitting in the pews facing the raised stage, quietly reading their Bibles, half-listening to the crackle of a battery-powered transistor radio.

  About 9:30 A.M., more than three hours into the assault, David comes to check on us. “Hold tight,” he says. “We’re trying to establish communication, maybe we can still work this out.” His hand is pressed against his wounded side and he holds himself awkwardly, but he’s amazingly calm, eyes sharp behind his glasses. Somehow he’s managed to summon the strength to overcome the injury and tour the battered building to bolster our courage. I truly fear for my life, yet David’s reassurance gives me hope that we can make a deal with the authorities for a safe surrender. One problem is that our contact with the FBI is cut off because Steve threw the phone out the window in outrage as soon as we were attacked. Apparently, a tank ran over the cord, severing our phone link with the agents.

  In between another wave of poisonous gas and yet another, in the timeless bubble that holds those of us huddling in the chapel in suspension, my thoughts drift to my mother, Balenda Ganem. For the past month she’s been living in a Waco motel, unable to contact me. I know she must be scared, really scared. As I’m thinking of her, a wave of intense longing washes over me. I want to be a kid once more, cuddled in her arms, and I’m terrified I might never again get close to her comforting warmth.

  My spirits rise when I listen to Ron Engelman’s radio show at 10:30 A.M., broadcast on station KGBS out of Dallas. Engelman, the one media source steadfastly sympathetic to our plight during the siege, is saying he can’t believe the U.S. government is actually attacking us with such violence. He implores us to come out, fearing we’ll all be killed if we don’t. But I can’t shake off the fear that if we do walk out we might be shot down like dogs.

  A network news flash interrupts Engelman’s show—an update from Waco. “Up to this point no one has come out,” the announcer rattles off breathlessly. “The FBI claims that eighty to one hundred gunshots have been directed against its agents.”

  This stuns me. It makes us seem as if we’re acting like the guys in the Alamo, making a suicidal last stand. My heart sinks, the last trace of hope drains from my body.

  I can’t swear that some of us aren’t responding to the assault with firearms at the other end of the building, but I’ve heard no gunfire in the chapel or anywhere nearby. In my despair I begin to believe that we are truly doomed, that the FBI may be setting the American public up for a massacre, and the possibility that I really could die today hits me full-force.

  The tank comes at us again, the gaseous nostrils at the tip of its boom poking blindly through the shattered wall. The machine sniffs air, searching, before spewing its foul stuff into our faces; I imagine it can actually smell our terror. We’re trapped here, debris blocks the exits. As the tank attacks, people scream and back away. There’s no way out and we cower wherever we can. I try to hide among a tall stack of amplifiers, squeezing into the middle of them, but when the tank crashes into the wall nearby I back away onto the stage.

  By noon, the building is a tinderbox. A thick layer of methylene chloride dust deposited by the CS gas coats the walls, floors, and ceilings, mingling with kerosene and propane vapors from our spilled lanterns and crushed heaters. To make things worse, a brisk, thirty-knot Texas wind whips through the holes ripped in the building’s sides and roof. The whole place is primed like a potbellied stove with its damper flung open.

  Suddenly, someone yells—Fire!

  Frantically, I look around for an escape route. The gym beyond the chapel is destroyed, a huge timber beam blocks my way. Working on gut instinct, crawling on hands and knees, I back up to the stairway leading to the overhead catwalk. On the upper level there’s debris everywhere, as if the building has been hit by an aerial bomb. Trying not to get cut by the shattered glass, I inch along the catwalk that crosses the length of the chapel ceiling, hoping to find a way to reach the children.

  The opening at the end of the catwalk is covered by a blanket. When I tentatively lift its edge a blast of smoke staggers me. Gingerly, I poke my head out. A fireball shoots down the corridor before my eyes—a red-and-yellow flash whose heat scorches my cheeks and deafens my ears with its roaring.

  Since I can’t go forward, I have to retreat down the catwalk to the stairs. When I get to the lower level I find that the chapel is on fire. Another fireball, from the gym area, races across the ceiling. The tank has knocked a hole in the wall at the edge of the stage and I see people huddled there, trying to get away from the thick smoke. The air’s heat causes me to remove my black leath
er jacket; it’s covered with white spots from the gas. My gas mask’s filter has run out; feeling suffocated, I tear it off.

  Ray Friesen, an elderly Canadian, says he can’t take it anymore—he’s going to jump out the window. I warn him they might shoot us, and he hesitates. Derek Lovelock, a black man from Britain, tells us he saw the women and kids in the concrete storage room. They haven’t made it to the underground bus because the way is blocked by rubble, he says, and my heart sinks lower. When Jimmy Riddle, a thirty-two-year-old Southerner, goes out the back door to the cafeteria, a tank rolls over the top of him, ripping off the right side of his torso. Stephen Henry, another young black man from Britain, is also run down, his left leg sheared off at the hip.

  Amid these horrors, a mutt puppy, one of the children’s pets, comes trotting toward me out of the smoke. I toss him out the window, shooing him away into the open air, but the terrified dog keeps coming back. In the distance I hear the mocking cries from the FBI speakers: “David, you’ve had your fifteen minutes of fame! Now bring your people out, the siege is over.”

  Now I’m down on my hands and knees, praying, God, if I’m going to die just make it quick. Just then, the wall of the stage catches fire, scorching the side of my face. The sharp smell of singed hair fills my nose and I scream from the depths of my gut. Seeing Jaime and Derek run out of the hole in the wall at the edge of the stage, I follow, preferring a swift death by the agents’ bullets to being roasted by fire.

  Time slows down as I stumble through the mud. There’s a Red Cross sign fifty yards away, its symbol a small ray of hope in the dark clouds of smoke.

  As Clive Doyle staggers through the same gap that I’ve just used to escape, flames follow. His arms are smoking, blistered skin peels from his hands, his coat is melting against his back. He thought he was the only survivor, he says, until he saw us. Marjorie Thomas, a black woman from Britain, is trapped on the second story. She puts her hands over her head, jumps out a window, then does a slow, 180-degree, midair turn, thumping on the ground, hideous burns all over her body. Graeme Craddock, a friend of Doyle’s from Australia, is lying inside the base of the tower, paralyzed, barely alive. Most of the nine people who escape the fire come out of the east wall of the chapel, like me, or through a crack in the front wall.

  FBI agents force us to lie in a row on the ground, face-down, and they tie our hands behind our backs with plastic straps. “Where are the women and children?” an agent demands, his face close to mine. When I tell him I still hope they’re in the buried school bus, I hear another agent say, “We teargassed that bus.” Oh no, I cry silently, imagining the kids being suffocated in that underground tomb. It turns out that six women died near the trapdoor, suffocated in the blocked passageway.

  One agent, a burly guy with a mustache, says grimly: “Hell, I knew this wasn’t going to work. We should’ve gone to Plan B.” What’s Plan B? I want to ask, but I keep my mouth shut; these men are scary.

  Abruptly, the whole building explodes. The wind from the pyrotechnic blast tugs at my exposed back, the din stuns my ears. I lift my head and see a sight that burns deep into my soul—a gigantic funeral pyre, black smoke and red-yellow flames filling the sky, incinerating my friends, Michele, my stepchildren, my life.

  BOOK ONE

  A Sense of Community

  1

  A GALAXY FAR AWAY

  The journey that brought me to Waco began twenty-four years earlier, in a galaxy far away. The psychological and emotional voyage between my life in Maine and my life on Planet Koresh would baffle any astronaut’s navigational skills. As my mother later told an interviewer, “I can’t imagine the Davey I know and love finding the answers to his questions in quotes from the Bible.”

  Born in 1969, I grew up during an unsettled time in which everything was up for question, even in quiet, Bangor. My mother, Balenda Ganem, was sixteen and pregnant when she married my father, David, only nineteen himself. It was, as she said, “the famous Summer of Love.” My mother wanted to name me Aaron, but a few days after I was born my father, who was in the Navy at the time, shipped out for active duty and, feeling sentimental, she named me after him.

  Theirs was truly an attraction of opposites. Balenda’s father’s family came from Lebanon, and her ebullient, emotional nature, always spilling over the edge, contrasted vividly with my dad’s French-Canadian–New Englander reserve. However, they shared a tremendous sense of humor, and my mom says my dad first took notice of her when she was the only one to laugh at his jokes at a high-school party.

  Balenda had another talent: She was a singer. When she was young she sang in cabarets, and her warm, strong voice charmed many audiences. My very first memory is of lying in my crib scared of the dark, until she came and sang me a lullaby about lambs. The melody was so beautiful it overwhelmed my fears and I began to cry, no longer with fright but with joy.

  The emotional pattern of my childhood was laid down early: my mom, a deeply comforting presence, the bedrock of my security, yet as vulnerable and nervous as I was; my dad, quiet, funny, brainy, introverted, and remote. He shared my mom’s love of music, though, and especially loved Chuck Berry’s “Little Queenie,” encouraging me to dance around the living room while it played on our stereo. He never took me to play ball or go fishing; he wasn’t that kind of dad. Instead, he was happiest reading, spending whole weekends with his nose in a book.

  My mom raised me on her hip, carrying me to protest marches and music and theater festivals even before I could walk. She brought me up to be very open, to discuss anything I might want to ask her about: politics, sex, society. Her mantra was, “Question authority.” She took me to folk festivals with political themes and to demonstrations against Maine Yankee, the nuclear power plant. When I was eight or nine we went to a Holly Near concert in Portland to hear her sing about suffering people in Chile and Nicaragua.

  We lived in a small apartment in Bangor’s east side, we were poor, and tensions were relentless. My father had a quick tongue, was always quick with the quip or a funny story; but all too often he used his sarcastic wit to keep people at a distance, including my mom and me. And he drank a lot. Their spats were scary, and even at four years old I felt that this was not how people ought to be with one another, especially two people I loved. Balenda and David separated when I was four, got together again six months later for a year, then, mercifully, divorced. Lots of kids I knew came from divorced families, so it was no big deal. My mom was involved with the experimental Shoestring Theatre in Portland, and those people were fun to be around because they were all passionate about life—very creative. It was a great environment to grow up in, very tolerant of personal lifestyles.

  When I was with my dad, in the various places his uneasy spirit led him, my scene was much narrower. In his curt Mainer’s way, he was impatient with what he perceived to be “weakness” or “self-indulgence.” For instance, one day after a real bad hazing at school, I moaned to him that kids were evil and mean. “Wait till you grow up into the world of men,” he curtly replied.

  After my parents split up Balenda and I moved into the home of my maternal grandmother, Gloria, in a middle-class neighborhood. For the first time I was in a calm place, and my dad receded into the middle distance. He went through yet another divorce before settling down with his present wife in Isleboro, an island off the coast of Maine. My mother’s brother, Bob, was the only male figure in my childhood who did fatherly things with me, like fishing and camping. I guess the lack of a real father figure, a supportive male role model, skewed my view of things.

  I loved Gloria and admired her. She worked three jobs to keep her family going after she divorced her husband. The Scottish strain in her inheritance inhibited her from being demonstrative, but she was always offering food, her way of showing affection. Maybe that’s why I could never say no to a snack. We watched old movies together, the roly-poly kid and the quiet old woman, alone in the house while my mom was working.

  My father’s family was Cat
holic, but he was never a churchgoer; on the contrary, he despised religion. Under the urging of Mim, my paternal grandmother, I attended Sunday school and midnight mass at Easter, but organized religion and the holy rollers on TV disgusted me with their hypocrisies. Mim insisted that I mumble my prayers before bed. Grandma Gloria never went to church, but she was the most Christian person, in the true sense, I’ve ever met. From Gloria I learned strong notions of right and wrong, and though she never spanked me, her quiet rebukes cut me to pieces. Both women were a vivid contrast to my mother, a typical, easygoing parent of the sixties—the fierce rebel against old moralities.

  Although I had little formal religion in my life, I often felt as if I had an angel looking out for me. When I really needed something it always seemed to be there. I didn’t see myself going out in search of God, whoever or whatever he, she, or it was. If there was something momentous out there, I had to learn it through music.

  I can hardly remember a time when drumming wasn’t the focus of my dreams. I had always loved music, ever since I was very young. I’d dance around the house, a rocker from the get go.